Power BI Embedded GA pricing update

Note: this pricing information is outdated. For current Power BI Embedded pricing please refer to this whitepaper and website.

Thank you for your great responses to the Power BI Embedded general availability announcement. Power BI Embedded is an Azure service that allows application developers to embed stunning, fully interactive reports and visualizations in customer-facing apps without the time and expense of having to build your own report controls from the ground up. Power BI Embedded is now available under an SLA in nine Azure data centers worldwide.

We wanted to take this opportunity to help drive further clarity around the GA pricing and licensing terms. It is worth highlighting that Power BI Embedded is a cloud service, and unlike many of our competitors doesn’t have any upfront software or infrastructure cost. It offers a simplified consumption-based pricing model, scales automatically, and supports multiple devices.

Free Report Authoring

Power BI Desktop is a visual data exploration and reporting tool that allows developers to build compelling reports at no additional cost. ISVs and developers can download the Power BI desktop tool. Developers can also take advantage of the dozens of Power BI custom visuals which are available in the Power BI custom visual gallery, and the open sourced production-quality Power BI visuals from GitHub to offer rich and powerful visuals that meet your apps’ unique needs.

You can create a Power BI Embedded Azure Workspace, host reports inside the workspace,and embed reports using APIs at no cost with your existing Azure subscription. So, in essence, there is no additional cost to develop and publish stunning fully interactive reports inside apps. You can find more details around the SDK in the product documentation page.

Simplified consumption model

Price per report session, per month in effect September 1st, 2016

0-100 sessions

Free

100+ sessions

$0.05/report session

It is only when your users view a report inside your app that you pay $.05 per report session. A report can contain any number of visuals or pages, and a report session is valid for 60 minutes, during which an end-user can do as many cross-filters, drill-downs, and refreshes as they need to at no additional cost to you. End-users of your applications will not need a PowerBI.com subscription to access the reports inside your app, and your first 100 report sessions are free every month.

Now let me address some of the most frequently asked questions from our ISV partners and customers:

What is a report session?

A session is a set of interactions between an end-user and a Power BI Embedded report. Each time a Power BI Embedded report is displayed to a user, a session is initiated and the subscription holder will be charged for a session. Sessions are billed at a flat rate, independent of the number of visual elements in a report. A session ends when either the user closes the report, or one hour after the session was initiated, whichever comes first.

What happens if my report has multiple pages and multiple visuals per page?

A report session is associated with a single report. The report session cost doesn’t change based on the number of visuals or number of pages in the report.

What happens when my end-user hits the refresh button in the browser?

If the browser is manually refreshed using its refresh button, it will initiate a new report session.

What happens if the end-user keeps the report open for hours but doesn’t interact with it?

If the report session is not active and there is no interaction between the report and the user then no new session gets initiated and hence there is not an incremental cost associated with it.

Simplified tracking and monitoring

It is really easy to track and monitor costs associated with the Power BI Embedded service using the Azure admin portal. You can track total consumed report sessions per Power BI Embedded workspace collection at all times so there are no surprises at the end of the month .

Power BI Embedded is a great option for Independent Software Vendors or enterprises building external-facing applications. Power BI Embedded is intended for applications that are provided for third party use. If you want to use the Power BI Embedded service to create an internal business application, each of your internal users will need a Power BI Pro USL, and your organization will be charged for their consumption of the Power BI Embedded service in addition to their Power BI Pro USL fees. To avoid incurring both Power BI Pro USL fees and Power BI Embedded consumption costs for internal applications, the Power BI service offers its own content embedding capabilities outside of Power BI Embedded for no additional cost to Power BI USL holders (dev.powerbi.com).